"Who am I?", asks Helma

As I'm compiling the concept and contents for a brand new gobi
based
helma.org
site, I have repeatedly noticed the same
dividing line going down straight through the middle of Helma
and the entire industry.

Is Helma a Java Application Server or a Javascript Application
Server? No, it is a Javascript-able Java Application Server.

Java is a strictly-typed language, Javascript a dynamically typed
one, and Helma is kind of sitting on a fence between the two
worlds.

This same divide continues through many other topics such as
the embedded database vs the object/relational mapping, the
extent to which coding conventions for Helma apps should be
established and encouraged vs the creative freedom of scripting
with all its pitfalls, etc.

Of course, we do not want to sit on a fence, but getting off the
fence in either direction means not using the full power Helma
has to offer on both sides - and turning away potential users
that might find Helma to be an ideal environment for their
personally preferred coding and development style.

Instead of being split by this divide, Helma could just get rid of it.
So, I'm working on describing Helma in a way that eliminates this
tension. If you recently have come across some articles that you
think I should read,
please let me know
.

Also, what do you expect from a fresh helma.org site? Any
suggestions regarding the structure and content are of course
very appreciated. I'm hoping to time the new site with the
release of Helma 1.5 or soon thereafter, therefore it will be put in
place rather quickly and then grown from there.

In the future, helma.org will have two sites, one for the
development of Helma itself and one for the users developing
with Helma, just like we now have the
helma-user
and
helma-dev
mailing lists.

Last night it was rainy and we didn't go in. But
the whole thing
taking place in our backyard, we heared NOA, the Lovebugs and David Hallyday just fine inside our house, be it with the backdrop of vibrating windows.

Root object is now named "Home" during the first initialisation of an application.

Changed makeSelectOptions to also work with a simple array of options rather than requiring value/string pairs.

Context of "this" in Mocha Objects now refers to the object that the current request resolves to.

Fixed a bug where the original title was replaced by the title specified for the current audience.

The adminEmail specified in the server.properties file is now used as the default contactEmail address.

Various minor/cosmetic bug fixes.

Diving deeper into OpenMocha:

As with version 0.5, simple "hello world" level examples are included in the default installation. They illustrate the general approach, how you would build your projects based on the OpenMocha framework as a "solution template". Basically, any files inside the apps/main directory besides the framework.zip file either override or extend the code contained inside the framework.zip file.

To get a much deeper look at the inside of the framework, and hence the default code that you can override and extend, do the following: Copy apps/main/framework.zip to apps/framework.zip and unzip it. This will create apps/framework as a separate demo application, revealing its example source code. To auto-start the new application and make it available via http://127.0.0.1:8080/framework/ you need to add "framework" on a new line to the apps.properties file and restart OpenMocha.

If you have any questions or if you are hitting a wall then please do not hesitate to ask either via private mail or
the mailing list
.

Mocha was the original project name of the very
popular scripting language known as
Javascript,an extremely rich, powerful
and flexible programming language that has a large, highly developed
syntax, a huge library of standard methods (functions) and built-in
capabilities to create complex, object-oriented data structures and
methods.

The kind of scripting we have seen
in web browsers for the last decade, I continue to call Javascript. I
use the term Mocha to refer to the usage of Javascript beyond that
scope, often on both the client-side and server-side and integrated
with other technologies such as XML and Java, producing "Web 2.0"
applications.

"[We] like to consider the hundreds of interconnected
Gopher servers to be one large distributed entity; thus,
we speak of "the Gopher", with its many small parts,
spread throughout the Internet. The Gopher is always
growing, always changing. It's everywhere, but you can't
locate it; it's always there, but you can't see it. ...
The Gopher is the largest and most practical example of
applied pantheism in the history of mankind."

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